LOVE YOUR LOCAL MARKET
“I like to interact with people,” says Phil. “Most of your customers are regulars and they appreciate you being here.” Victoria, fresh to the market from London, felt this as soon as she arrived as a new trader in April. She founded The Tea Apothecary, a business which draws on the medicinal, transformative elements of tea – coincidentally named in line with the market’s medieval ‘Apothecaries Row’. “Cambridge is such a such a traditional, quintessential English town in so many ways,” Victoria says. “I wanted to do something alternative, bringing the pleasure and creativity of tea more into the mainstream.” Cambridge certainly suits Victoria. “It feels like a place where you can quite easily belong, without necessarily coming from here. That kind of conversation and openness doesn’t happen in bigger places. “On my very first day, I didn’t know where I was going,” Victoria says. “People came over, welcomed me and brought me a gift from their stalls – a waffle, some fruit or a bagel. It feels like you’re not just setting up a stall, you’re part of a community.” One of four bookstalls, Bookish Cambridge – run by two close friends – has been going for five years. Beginning in Ely, the stall hopped across to Cambridge and delivered books during the pandemic. “If people come to us asking for a book and we haven’t got it, we send them over to Henry Hardinge, and vice versa,” says Anne Phillips, one half of Bookish Cambridge. “It’s one of the things I enjoy most, that people are all in it together.”
footsteps, working on the market in her twenties, she bought her current stall, fuelled by a passion for geology. “The general market has had lots of changes in management, so there have been different drives and directions to it over the years,” Mal says. “When my mum first came to market in 1997, there were a lot more fresh foods – it was about getting your local supply.” In recent years, hot food has flourished, with five stalls burgeoning into 27 since Neide Lopes De Melo opened her Brazilian food stall, Neides, in 2014. She says the pandemic merely deepened this divide: “Other owners suffered because they don’t sell food – they left during Covid-19 and now there’s a desire to bring everyone back again.” Neide first opened a cafe-deli on Mill Road, but moved to the market while that business declined – discovering the city centre and its community. “At the beginning it was fantastic because the
With passing trade, it’s easy to tempt passers-by for a rummage – and their plunder is often all the more special. “We have regulars who come because we’ve always got something different,” says Anne. “People like that they know Kate and I. They’ll say: ‘Have you got anything new this week? Have you read this?’ I don’t think you get that in a big store.” SPICE OF LIFE Mal of The Science of Magic, selling fascinating rocks and crystals, frequented Cambridge’s central and Sunday All Saints Market as a teen, after her artist mother took up a stall there. Following in her
IT’S NOT JUST SETTING UP A STALL, YOU’RE PART OF A COMMUNITY
56 MAY 2022 CAMBSEDITION.CO.UK
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